Poetry · 2024 · An Eclectic Elegy
Dry-Docked in New Jersey
Poetry written from inside the experience, not around it.
I know what it is to watch the person you love disappear in front of you.
Forty-six pages of personal witness: exacting, tender, unsentimental language for a loss that never became simple.
- Publisher
- Kelsay Books
- Edition
- 46-page paperback
- Published
- August 28, 2024
Why I wrote this
When I stopped trying to be okay.
My husband had a terminal brain tumor. For two years, I was his wife, his caregiver, and the witness to his own disappearing.
These poems are what I wrote during and after. They are not a guide to healing. They tell the truth about the anger, the tenderness, and the way love does not leave simply because he did.
If you have lived through the illness and loss of someone you love, you may recognize parts of your own life here.
Personal witness
Carried for thirty years. Published when the poems were ready.
Sandra wrote through Greg’s illness and its aftermath, then carried these poems for decades before bringing them into print.
“She lifts language to shine a light on what many of us aren’t able to articulate.”— Jacinta V. White, editor, Snapdragon Journal of Healing
From the title poem
“I don’t drive a stick / So his Saab turbo convertible sulks like a neglected Christmas toy…”
Ordinary objects carry memory: a car, a café, a napkin trick, a chair. Each keeps holding a piece of love, loss, anger, or laughter after the life around it changes.
A shared loss
My daughter lost him too.
Haley was young when Greg got sick. She watched her father disappear, but her grief was her own. Some poems hold what it meant to be a daughter in that hospital room—and what it meant to be the parent who had to keep standing.
If you lost a parent young, or watched your child grieve their other parent, you may hear something familiar in these lines.
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